The perils of stargazing
Reading yesterday’s press release for the Educause 2007 Horizon Report, I was a bit nonplussed by its choice of technologies. Not for the first time, I wonder if the organizational culture and business processes that characterise higher education mean that we are doomed always to lag far behind the crest of the technological wave.
The Horizon Report is a widely read and influential publication, and its scope is clearly defined: “Each year, [it] describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years” (cf. press release, Para. 2). And according to Educause, the “significant impact” picks for 2007 are: User-Created Content; Social Networking; Mobile Phones; Virtual Worlds; The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication; Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming.
Let us recall that the Horizon Report aims to identify trends and technologies that will impact over the next one to five years. My sense is that the overwhelming mood among faculty and the educational technology community (including the collective tenor of the experiences recounted among the Educause blogging community) is that the technologies and modes identified in this years’ list have already achieved significant impact. There is one self-evident conclusion to draw from this. This year’s Horizon Report is not futurology: it is history.
Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t consider the Report’s perceived time-lag to be a bad thing, especially when we consider the audience for which it is designed. The Report finds a wide readership at the institutional management level. Managers of educational institutions are necessarily conservative (with a small ‘c’): conservative in the sense that it is their duty to seek to conserve and to protect their cultural values and institutional mission. Fostering technology-driven change, if we understand such change as the pursuit of innovation for its own sake (as opposed to, say, the pursuit of organizational or individual development), is not part of their mindset. Institutional leaders look to the Report for a ‘state of the art’ update on what’s happening ‘out there’. From within the safety of the institutional citadel, most managers prefer to conceive of ‘out there’ as a jungle. The message that the revolution has already occurred, that the citizens have stormed the barricades, or indeed, that the inmates are currently running the asylum, may not be a message that they are willing or able to hear.
The overarching factors, or Key Trends, that are identified at the outset of the Horizon Report (eg. 'Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate'; Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given', pp.3-4) are spot on. They are indeed changing the higher ed landscape - it would be hard to argue otherwise. I suppose what puzzles, and intrigues, me about the Report is the way in which it relates these overarching factors to its pick of technology trends for higher education.
Are these trends 'for' higher education, that is, trends for the future, or trends already existing 'within' it? Or both? Much more importantly, are technology trends evident in the broader society necessarily a good thing for educational practice - should we be fostering them? How do we distinguish between good and bad uses of them? What are their pedagogical affordances - and disadvantages?
The way the Report treats the topic of Social Networking is a good example of the way in which its authors seem to gloss over the distinction between current practices and future speculation, and in the process, fail to consider certain key issues for adoption within HE. Many phrases in the section point to evidence that Social Networking is a bottom-up phenomenon, and that it has already achieved wide adoption among students. Social Networking is 'undoubtedly the most pervasive aspect of Web 2.0'; 'It is the intense interest shown by students that is bringing social networking into academia'; 'the features that make them [social networking sites] so compelling are the features that we need to understand and incorporate into higher education websites' (pp.12-13).
Yet the success stories, forming the Report's rationale for academic adoption, are linked closely to the now-familiar commercial names: MySpace, Facebook. Academic applications seem mostly to be futuregazing. One of the principal examples of an academic-generated system given in the Report, a tool developed at RIT's Social Computing Lab (MUPPETS) seems to me to be less of a social networking system, and more a combination of visualisation tool, collaborative work environment, and MMORPG. It's certainly an innovative tool, and seems like it would be great for peer learning, but is it 'really' a social networking tool?
Maybe the real lesson is that, in a learning context, social networking applications have to be blended with other applications and activities to be useful. That would be a very useful finding. But the point doesn't seem to be clearly made. Nor did I find discussion of pressing issues like what it means (for institutions, for individuals) to choose outsourced applications instead of institutional ones. Nor a discussion of what the disadvantages might be of embedding social networking into education. There are upsides and downsides to any pedagogical tool or strategy. We need to know about both sides in order to make a balanced decision.
While I understand your point, it would be more helpful and productive if you were to offer commentary on specific points made in the Horizon Report. I don't think the document is very far offbase in most of its statements. The stated objective of the document is to "to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impacton teaching, learning, or creative expression withinhigher education (emphasis added)." If they were focusing on society at large then I would tend to agree with you that they're lagging behind. But as higher ed is, as you point out, conservative and thus itself generally lagging behind many other facets of society, their predictions seem to be reasonable to me.
For example: The technology with which I am most familiar in the document, social networking, is definitely one that has had a huge impact on our students but much less of one on how we teach and interact with them. Many people on the cutting edge (whether they realize it or not) are and have been embracing this technology but the majority of educators and administrators are not. The other technologies and trends discussed in the document strike me as being similar in many ways: often present in society but still making or just beginning to make inroads into mainstream higher ed.
Therefore it would be most helpful if you were to discuss specific examples.